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Your Kids' School Bus Is About to Become a Roaming Surveillance Vehicle
- jo6gwb 3mo agoLook up the history of this company, bus patrol - they're felons and in prison.
- know-how 3mo ago[dead]
- tristor 3mo agoI read a few different articles such as https://www.thenewspaper.com/news/67/6717.asp https://www.thenewspaper.com/news/67/6717.asp and https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/corrupt-public-official-sentenced-082919 https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/corrupt-public-official-sen... It seems like it's not BusPatrol, but a company they acquired (Force Multiplier Solutions) that had corrupt leadership. I'm not sure how exactly that went down, or if the same people are still involved, but it does sound pretty bad. Apparently the corruption here caused the Dallas County Schools to go bankrupt and ultimately to be shut down and the school district split into other surrounding districts to take over.
- senkora 3mo agoThis is the first that I'm hearing about this, but I don't think that your telling is quite right. The Dallas school district is "Dallas ISD", not Dallas County Schools. Dallas County Schools was apparently a school bus service provider that served many different school districts in the area. I don't know why they named it that... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas_County_Schools https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas_County_Schools That situation looks pretty bad, but what happened was that a public school bus services provider went bankrupt, the school districts that it served became responsible for finding private replacement service providers, and residents of the service area had their property taxes raised to pay off the debt. No school districts went bankrupt or were split up, just school bus service providers.
- tristor 3mo agoAh, I had misunderstood this based on the first article saying that "Dallas County Schools" went bankrupt and was dissolved via a voter referendum. Based on its name and the apparent requirement of a vote, I had understood this intuitively to be a school district. Thanks for the clarification.
- dismalaf 3mo agoWho'd have thought a bus company would run buses for the various applications that buses are used for.
- cf100clunk 3mo agoThat point-of-view doesn't soothe anyone alarmed by expansion of warrantless law enforcement surveillance.
- alistairSH 3mo agoTIL - the purpose of buses is mass surveillance. SMH.
- buellerbueller 3mo agoI guess once someone is a felon, they should never be allowed income? You might be right to criticize the company itself, but is their specific felonious behavior problematic (if so, you haven't spelled that out)? The way you say it, just the fact of them being felons is the problem.
- Bender 3mo agoPerhaps not managing AI camera systems that track children. There are plenty of other career options.
- buellerbueller 3mo ago>There are plenty of other career options. No, not really, for felons. >Perhaps not managing AI camera systems that track children. Literal think of the children lol.
- NDlurker 3mo agoNever being allowed income and getting contracts for mass surveillance are not the same thing.
- nayuki 3mo agoMaybe design cities to be walkable and bikeable so that you have the option get things done without driving a car which is inherently trackable?
- embedding-shape 3mo agoWish granted, now cameras are put up on every walk path and bus stop instead, as people keep getting robbed to/from the stores, so while the school buses aren't fitted with cameras, the streets are instead.
- cucumber3732842 3mo agoI'll take it a step further. Condoning the surveillance state because it makes the things they want people to like less comparatively worse is exactly the sort of evil "use anything as leverage to advance my goals" behavior is exactly how we got here.
- NoSalt 3mo agoI, for one, do not wish to smell my malodorous coworkers - who have walked or cycled to work and are all sweaty - all day. I already have one of them and it makes me want to vomit.
- cf100clunk 3mo agoThere are ways to gently inform the person(s) of your discomfort. If communicated well, it can be settled. In one case I dealt with, body odour of someone on my team was causing another person distress, but some gentle, kind advice (yes, it was embarrassing as hell so we did it in private) and a quick trip by him to the shops for some deodorant resolved the problem almost instantly. Here's hoping.
- NoSalt 3mo agoWhy should the onus be on me when they are the disgusting ones and the employers are at fault for not offering showers?
- defrost 3mo agoThis has been an ongoing concern (internal surveillance of children and drivers, external of other traffic) for at least two months now: * They're Putting AI Cameras In School Buses (April 7th 2026) - https://www.usermag.co/p/theyre-putting-ai-cameras-in-school https://www.usermag.co/p/theyre-putting-ai-cameras-in-school * School bus Driver Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoAvL1MoTIA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoAvL1MoTIA
- dismalaf 3mo agoWhile I'm sympathetic to a lot of privacy concerns, how hard is it to simply not be an asshole and not pass school buses when they have their flashing lights out? Also, every car with a dashcam or built in cameras is basically already this. Where I live every intersection has cameras. Most of the buildings. It's not like this is anything new and honestly, probably a better use of cameras than most of the other applications.
- cf100clunk 3mo agoThe concern is the sharing of such surveillance with law enforcement and other government agencies.
- cucumber3732842 3mo agoa) it doesn't actually happen that often b) when it does it's usually some stupid situation where robotic adherence to the lights is in poor taste (like a bus picking up or discharging an entire team on a right side curb, or a divided median) albeit legally mandated. c) School bus drivers already radio in plate numbers of anyone who does it in poor taste and the buses mostly already have dashcams so this isn't really solving a problem Source: bus driver in the family
- buellerbueller 3mo agoHappens more school days than not on my street.
- vel0city 3mo agoa) it happens all the time Source: actual statistics instead of just second hand reports from a single bus driver. https://www.ghsa.org/resource-hub/school-bus-safety-action-plan https://www.ghsa.org/resource-hub/school-bus-safety-action-p...
- cucumber3732842 3mo ago39mil/yr (coming from the people who want to play up the problem) is less than half a percent of trips. Which is pretty amazing to me considering that a trip is an hour or so of stop and go on surface roads. I assume a huge fraction of that is just from opposing traffic that isn't paying attention or behaving conservatively enough to be in a position to be stopped as soon as it's red. Seriously, this isn't a problem. We're talking a small amount of petty unlawful behavior that almost certainly has a near zero conversion ratio to actual harm to anybody. That's not a good reason to crank the 1984 to 11 and anyone that says it is is a bad person and I'll die on that hill.
- cligcow 3mo ago[dead]
- user142 3mo agoJudging by the enthusiasm for hosted AI models and tools like Claude Code on Hacker News, I don't think people care much about surveillance anymore.
- xhkkffbf 3mo agoYes, this is concerning. But there's also the other side. Some of the little miscreants who shared my bus ride were positively nasty. Some surveillance would have helped a number of people avoid bullying.
- giantg2 3mo agoThat's only true if the school will actually do something based the surveillance evidence. It seems many do not.
- rationalist 3mo ago> surveillance would have helped a number of people avoid bullying. Just like cameras at the bank prevent bank robberies?
- olyjohn 3mo agoHow about we don't rely on cameras to keep people from being assholes? That's not a fix to the problem, that just leads to smarter assholes.
- xhkkffbf 3mo agoWhat's your plan? The parents don't believe the charges made against their child. At least the video helps the school figure out what happened and convey this accurately to the parents. But it sounds like you have some magic idea of how this will work. Could you share it with us?
- jeffbee 3mo agoPeople who pass through red signals need a night or two in jail, not enhanced privacy protections.
- nayuki 3mo agoTrue, but the article is complaining about other innocent people that might get caught in the surveillance dragnet.
- jeffbee 3mo agoThat's too generous. It is a propaganda piece by the driver lobby using a hypothetical, fabricated privacy argument to further the central driver lobby goal of total impunity.
- arjie 3mo agoThe existence of a license plate indicates that motor vehicle travel is not intended to be untrackable. That makes sense since these are powerful devices. It seems like a fair trade off since a motor vehicle provides many benefits but also high risk.
- alistairSH 3mo agoIn a vacuum, I agree. But, license plate readers aren't limited to investigating crime/misuse of vehicle, nor are they limited to the government. Tracking vehicles and linking that movement to individual movement (and spending and browsing and and and) used to be massively expensive, if not impossible. Now all that tracking is "cheap" and being done at scale for all sorts of reasons.
- Sayrus 3mo agoWhy stop at tracking license plates? Once you've started you should report on pedestrians, bikes, whether people are at-home, which building people are entering, the way they walk and many more. Those are all "alternative revenue streams" that are as valid from the operator/investor point of view and completely unrelated to whether the way of transportation or activity is meant to be untrackable or unrelated to a way of transportation at all. There is also a factor of scale: a cop can follow you, but a system where everyone is monitored 24/7 is a very different story.
- garyfirestorm 3mo agoJust implant the AirTag on my body and share it with everyone ffs
- josefritzishere 3mo agoThat's never going to be misused or anything... gross.
- jessillions 3mo agoI wish i still had the capacity to be surprised by anything
- bokohut 3mo agoI chaperoned a 7th grade field trip at the beginning of June 2026 and I have not been on a school bus for many years. As a serial technologist entrepreneur and technology platform creator this school bus was a mecca of tracking technology and I was taking photos from this limited time I was given riding in this mobile edge data collection vehicle which originally was only used to move kids to and from school. The bus had 11 cameras visible that I could see located on the inside and outside. Mounted on the ceiling above and to the left of the drivers head was a small locked mini rack that I assume was the consolidation point of all wires to a Digital Video Recorder. I could not determine, nor was informed, if this system is remotely accessible but it must be given the worlds appetite for "connected" which many believe means 'easy'. I spoke to the bus driver and she informed me that she loves the cameras and that they have been used to suspend kids thus proving her innocents and have also been used by law enforcement 'looking' for things. She also told me of a unique case where a kid placed spikes under a bus tire and this kid got more than a suspension from his actions that the video recorded. Interesting times where everything is being recorded however the context of a situation can obviously still be missing from any recorded evidence. Seems like everyone's privacy is just "flocked". ;)